Tag Archives: Jackson Katz

Dr. Jackson Katz is an expert on violence, media, and masculinity. Even though his expertise is only tangentially related to my research and pedagogy, he offers a wonderful and articulate definition of privilege as it relates to race, gender, and sexuality. The whole damn thing is worth a watch.

Bling quote:

So let’s talk for a moment about race. In the US when we hear the word race, a lot of people think that means African-American, Latino, Asian American, Native American, South Asian, Pacific Islander, on and on. A lot of people, when they hear the word ‘sexual orientation’ think it means gay, lesbian, bisexual. And a lot of people when they hear the word ‘gender’, think it means women. In each case, the dominant group doesn’t get paid attention to, right? As if White people don’t have some of racial identity or don’t belong to some sort of racial category or construct. As if heterosexual people don’t have a sexual orientation. As if men don’t have a gender.

This is one of the ways that dominant systems maintain and reproduce themselves. Which is to say the dominant group is rarely challenged to even think about its dominance because that’s one of the key characteristics of power and privilege: the ability to go un-examined, lacking introspection, in fact being rendered invisible in large measure, in the discourse about issues that are primarily about us; and it’s amazing how this works …

Katz does an effective job here of depicting hegemonic culture as, by definition, invisible. When it comes to the pedagogical terms we use in our classrooms like neutral and standard, I feel a connection between these terms and the idea that dominant culture is so embedded, established, and unquestioned, that it becomes an epicenter where the minority constructs are all outliers. Outlier means exotic means inferior means substandard.